In the midst of clearing work, I decided to bake a cake for the niece’s birthday. The motivation to bake was dwindling, but I thought I might as well carry on the tradition of baking for the family’s birthdays. As always, the design of the cake is a big thing for me and I decided to use grapes for decoration. Here’s my humble bake.

 

 

 

 

(Makes a standard Swiss Roll)

Ingredients

For the swiss roll

  • 75g top flour
  • 60g milk
  • 40g canola oil
  • 35g castor sugar and 35g castor sugar
  • 4 eggs separated
  • 1/4 tsp cream of tartar (optional)

For the filling

  • 1 cup whipping cream
  • a bunch of green and red seedless grapes

Method

For the Swiss roll

  1. Preheat the oven at 160 degrees and line the base of the baking tray with baking paper.
  2. Sift the flour and set aside.
  3. In a small pot, heat the oil to about 70 degrees or until you see streaks in the oil.
  4. Pour in the sifted flour and whisk to combine.
  5. Add the milk and sugar and whisk to combine.
  6. Add the yolks and whisk till combined.
  7. In a clean mixing bowl, whisk egg whites till foamy and add the cream of tar tar (this is optional, it works to stabilise the egg whites) and whisk till soft peak.
  8. Add the sugar a spoonful at a time and beat till firm peak.
  9. Add a third of the meringue into the batter and use a hand whisk to combine the egg whites and the batter. You do not need to be too gentle a this time because this step is just to make the batter to be at a similar consistency with the meringue for easier combining.
  10. Fold in the rest of the meringue gently till the egg whites is no longer visible. Do not over mix.
  11. Bake in the preheated oven for 20 minutes and turn the tray around and bake for another 2 to 3 minutes.
  12. Remove tray from oven and leave to cool for 2 minutes.
  13. Sift icing sugar all over the top of the cake, place a dry tea towel on top of the cake, place a tray of similar size to the baking tray and invert the tray so the baking paper is now facing up.
  14. Peel off the baking paper and sift icing sugar all over the cake and place a tea towel on top, inverting it again so the drawing is facing down.
  15. Roll up the cake together with the tea towel and leave to cool. This is to set the ‘memory’ for the cake, so it is easy to roll up later.
  16. Beat the whipping cream to soft peak, unroll the swiss roll as much as possible and spread whipped cream on the baked swiss roll and add the grapes and roll into a tight roll and leave in fridge to chill before cutting into the roll.
  17. Decorate as desired. I did mine simple, decorating the top with some cream and halved grapes.

I want to make the decoration more sophisticated in the next bake.